As the PGA Championship comes to the South Carolina coast next week, we can’t help looking back to Kiawah Island’s first brush with fame.

The Ocean Course at Kiawah was literally built for the very eagerly awaited 1991 Ryder Cup, an odd, unprecedented circumstance: when they raised the flags and played the national anthems, it was also the course grand opening. The event that followed was so absorbing and dramatic that people still talk about it, of which I’m glad, because I wrote a book about it (The War by the Shore, about to be released).

Of the 27 co-stars in that big-budget production, only three return to Kiawah next week. A player, a Captain, and the architect…

The player is Jose-Maria Olazabal, an intense and talented member of Europe’s twelve-man team, and the foursomes and four-ball partner of the immortal Seve Ballesteros. It’s no particular surprise that of all of the participants, JMO had the youth and the game to last through the decades. But it will be odd to see him at the Ocean Course without Seve, who died of a brain tumor in May of last year. The two Basque golf warriors formed possibly the greatest Ryder Cup team ever, with Seve the charismatic and histrionic alpha dog, and Olly, slow and steady as a turtle. They were undefeated in four matches in ’91.

Although the leader of the ’91 US team tried and failed to find a combination that could torpedo the Spanish Armada, Captain Dave Stockton’s squad won the War. But, according to people who mattered, it had all been too emotional, too loud, and over-the-top with rah-rah nationalism. Stockton was not offered the captaincy for the next go-round—as if he’d caused the supercharged atmosphere. Tom Watson got the job, and made frequent vows to return the competition of civility and sportsmanship—as if he could.

Prior to the first round of the Championship, Stockton will be handed the PGA 2012 Distinguished Service Award.

Stockton and Olazabal were on opposite sides in ’91, but they had a common enemy: Pete Dye, the elusive genius who designed the Ocean Course. It was and remains the hardest course in the world.

Dye was like a thousand other guys in the 1950s: an insurance salesman with a golf jones. When he married Alice—who was, like him, from Indianapolis and an excellent amateur golfer—his preoccupation with the game ratcheted still higher. How to make a living from his obsession? The Dyes took a tour of the classic courses of Scotland, and took notes, and came home, and hung out a shingle.

Interviews with Dye in ’91 were unsatisfying; he kept repeating that he was just proud to be a part of the team. But John Strawn, the author (Driving the Green) turned golf architecture executive (he’s currently with Hills-Forrest) visited Dye while he was a-building the Ocean. What’s going on here? Strawn asked. And Dye got down on his hands and knees like a back yard quarterback scratching out a play in the dirt. Dye molded miniature fairways and greens and dunes in the sand, showing an understanding of wind, hydrology, and golfer’s psychology, insights that he could not put into words.

This week they’ll be back at Kiawah, a triangle of men who were once united by a war at the shore.

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